An Outsider's Opinion

This past week, I was absent from class and given the assignment to discuss our case studies with a student that was not in our Paideia class. I chose to speak with someone who is a biology major and got an interesting response from them on these case studies. For the most part, she and I agreed on how we would try to solve these issues, but she seemed to struggle slightly more to give a definitive answer.

As a whole, she seemed to take a much more scientific and data driven approach to solving this issues. As we moved from one question to the next, she seemed frustrated by how difficult they were to answer. Then, after hearing the question, she would often say that her answer would depend on so many factors that she didn't know how to respond, such as who the individual was in the story, what her role was at the school, and other pieces of background information. At one point, when discussing a case study that involved test scores, she essentially threw out the question because no numbers for these test scores were discussed and, therefore, the question was not valid! It was good to see a similar point of view, but also interesting to see how our way of thinking differed!

Case Study Discussion

In my discussion group's last meeting, we decided to go back to the case studies that we spoke about in class on Monday since we didn't have as much time as we would have liked. One of the questions that our group found the hardest to answer was which of the three students should be chosen to participate in an advanced program. Although we could agree somewhat on the first two students, the third to join the program ended up being the hardest to pick because everyone had a different opinion as to what was most important for a student to have. In the end, we all seemed to agree that the process would be somewhat easier to determine who would or wouldn't particpate in the program if we knew the students personally.

It was just as difficult to determine what to do if we were in a situation where we were supposed to paddle a student. All of us seemed to agree that we never would have gotten into a situation that would require us to harm our students, even if it was permitted by the school and their parents. We tried developing some alternative ideas that could be used as a means of punishing students and maintaining behavior in the classroom without physical harm towards the students, but we felt that the children would only see us as weak or without power in the classroom if we tried any other form of non-physical punishment.

Surprisingly, the easiest question for us all to answer was how to handle budget cuts. If we were forced to choose one of the options, none of us would have cut AP or extended learning programs like the group in class chose to cut. Instead, we all decided it would be better to increase the classrooms by 5 students. This would be the best method, we all believed, since there would be no loss of additional programs. Also, we all commented that our class sizes in elementary school were around 30 to start with, so it didn't seem like a room of 30 children would be unmanagable.

Paideia II

This past week at my small group discussion, we thought it might be a good idea to begin brainstorming ideas for our paper due this Friday. Somehow our discussion got onto the topic of school being mandatory for students. This discussion ended up being one of my favorite education based peer conversations I've had in a long time. For the most part, the four of us brought up many different ideas pertaining to both the benefits of mandatory schooling and the weaknesses of our current system.

For example, we all agreed that mandatory schooling is good for those children who may need to be exposed to the benefits of education when their parents might not have had a good experience or believe in the schooling system. But as children enter older ages, when would it be acceptable for them to drop out of school and make this educated decision on their own? Even if these students think that they have a profession for their future in mind by the time they reach middle school and do not believe they need any further schooling for that profession, are these middle schoolers old enough to make this type of mature decision on their own and not an impulsive one? Certainly questions to ponder!